#475:Sex Abuse—From Denial to Action

In various ways, people are in denial of what it will take to finally solve the sex abuse crisis.

The Vatican Summit on Sex Abuse

Everyone wants to end the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis once and for all.  We want abusers found and punished, we want officials who cover up held accountable, and we want concrete actions to prevent future of abuse.

But reactions to the recent Vatican summit have shown that many people are still in denial of the true nature, scope, complexity, and depth of the problem.  These denials take several forms, but they all have one thing in common: they erect barriers to action, and impede the end of the crisis.

So it becomes important to name and denounce each of these denials, for until they end the crisis will persist.

Denial #1: “We don’t have this problem.” From the start, the main focus of the Vatican summit was announced to be, not problem solving, but education.  Why?  Because many bishops remain in denial that there is a problem at all.  Especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, bishops have typically thought of—and dismissed-- sex abuse as “an American problem” or “a Western problem.” The summit aimed to correct this by informing the bishops of the cases emerging in their own regions and by the testimony of victims. 

We can only hope that bishops went home persuaded that they can no longer avoid addressing the problem in their own dioceses.

Denial #2. This is no time for Education, only Action.  The second denial comes from those who saw the summit wasting time and not proposing concrete solutions.  It’s easy to understand their disappointment, especially among the victims, who understand the problem best because they experienced it first-hand.  But they may overlook the global nature of the institution that must address this problem.

Clergy abuse has occurred on five continents and in many forms: child abuse, abuse of seminarians, abuse of young adults, abuse of women, and (especially in Africa) abuse of women religious.  Abuse will not end with one simple plan--both the problem and the church are too complex for that.  It does not help to persist in denying that many of those Bishops are themselves in denial and must first of all be persuaded to pay attention. Getting the world’s bishops on board is a real action, a first step. 

Denial #3: The Gays are to blame. A third, related denial involves denying the need for multiple solutions.  Since abuse takes different forms in different locations, “one size fits all” will not work.  Seeking one quick fix can actually hinder real solutions—and lead to false fixes that leave real problems untouched.

For example, when an observer like George Weigel claims that “In the so called developed world, the plague seem to have largely involve the sexual abuse or exploitation of young men,” he is not just wrong: he also displays a denial of the real facts. In the US crisis, the main body of victims has, in fact, been minors-- children!- -who are most vulnerable to priestly abuse of power.  Denying this reality focuses our attention on secondary issues that will lead us to false fixes.

Specifically, Weigel and those who think like him want to pin the crisis on gay priests, and argue that the simple solution is better screening and more strictly practiced celibacy. They portray the crisis as an ethical breach by gay men wrongly admitted to the priesthood. 

But this denies two central facts.  First, pedophiles are generally disordered individuals attracted to children, not homosexuals attracted other man.  These are mostly two different populations. I know many good celibate priests who are gay, and scapegoating or stigmatizing them will solve nothing.

Second, gay priests who fail to maintain a celibate life break a church rule, just like heterosexual priests who have secret mistresses. Officials who prey on students or subordinates also commit an ethical breach by abusing their authority.  But pedophiles who prey on minors of either sex commit a crime.  Thus, while in other locations clergy sex abuse may be about violating church rules and moral teachings, in the U.S. has it has been especially about violating the law. 

And bishops who enabled this may also have violated the law (just this week, French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was given a six-month suspended prison sentence for not going to authorities about the alleged abuse of minors by a priest).

Denying that the Church in the US and elsewhere has a problem with criminals in the clergy will only block real solutions.

Denial #4: This is mainly a problem of sexual immorality. The horrible history of bishops recycling abusers to new parishes – and thus enabling them to rape more kids– was caused precisely by bishops thinking this was about sin – a moral problem that confession, repentance, and penance would solve.  But no, that never worked, because the real problem was (1) an abuse of power by (2) pathologically disordered people.  The only solution was to strip such men of their priestly power, and (if and when treatment failed) isolate them from potential victims.

To deny this, and talk as if the abusers’ evil was about sexual immorality, prevents us from tackling the twin dangers of pathology and power.  This is not primarily about sinners who must repent; it is about criminals who must be stopped.

Denial #5:  The Pope can fix this right now.  The failure to discipline bishops who cover up abuse or simply mismanaged controlling the abusers has of course worsened the scandal.  And in some ways a cover-up is worse than the original abuses.  But both canon law and church structure give bishops a high degree of autonomy, even in relationship to the pope.  Many decry the slow speed of action from the top, and Pope Francis has probably deserved some criticism for being too slow to believe and to act on allegations against bishops.

But Andrew J. Bacevich offers another angle. Bacevich is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and  a retired US Army Colonel. He is also a life-long Catholic, and he recently observed that a realistic view of church structures suggests that its pace, while not up to many expectations, is nonetheless reasonable:  

Not without cause, critics have lambasted the Catholic Church (to which I belong) for being slow to address the epidemic of clergy sex abuse. Yet when it comes to acknowledging institutional failure and initiating remedial action, Rome moves with gazelle-like swiftness in comparison with the Pentagon. Pope Francis knows that he has a serious problem on his hands. In Washington, the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff either haven’t noticed or don’t care that the military…has achieved a less than stellar record.

Thinking Francis can end the crisis by papal fiat only obscures the need for a systematic reform of procedures and policies that can be led by Francis but must be supported by the world’s bishops-- procedures and policies that will probably vary by region depending on the shape of abuse there and local legal systems.

Denial #6: Band-aids will do.  Thinking such reforms will prevent future trouble is yet another barrier to enabling ending the crisis, because it denies the underlying causes.  Dealing with those requires solid answers to two questions: (1) how did this horror happen in the first place?  And (2) why did it continue on unreported and unsolved for so long?

 Francis himself has suggested the answer to number (2) by saying that there will be no solution to this crisis as long as clericalism exists: “To say "no" to abuse is to say an emphatic "no" to all forms of clericalism.” (see CrossCurrents #471 “Ending Clericalism, Our ‘Original Sin’”).

And I have argued that answering number (1) requires us to examine an entire range of dysfunctions within the Church: our attitudes toward sexuality in general, our treatment of people who violate sexual rules, our pressures on people who do not fit the norms, our seminary cultures, our demand that all priests must be celibate, our myth about the asexual “purity” of ordained men, our acceptance of the clericalism, our moralization of all things sexual and our blindness about pathological disorders (see CrossCurrents #472 “How Could This Horror Happen?”).

Failure to acknowledge these two underlying issues and failure to address them will leave our Church vulnerable to future abuses of pathology and power. This crisis is not something that simply emerged in the last generation or two; the potential for this crisis has been baked into church structures for a century or more.  Unless we get to the bottom of that, we will not be finally clear of the crisis.

It is all too easy to fall into denying just how complex and profound this crisis is.  But we must fight against all such denials, for each denial blocks our path to get the Church right again.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 201

#472: How Could This Horror Happen?

The sex abuse crisis has flared up more than ever with the Pennsylvania grand jury, the Cardinal McCarrick case, calls for bishops to resign, and allegations against Vatican officials including the last three popes. Clearly there is no easy fix--if any fix at all.  But any fix must answer three major questions.

Current investigations focus first on (1) What has happened? and it will be urgent to follow with (2) How can it be stopped? But any solutions depend on good answers to (3) Why did it happen? beacause if we misunderstand why this crisis could arise we may apply false solutions that fix nothing--or make matters worse.

The problem comes in two parts: priestly abuse itself and the hierarchical cover-up.  In my last blog (CrossCurrents #471) I argued that the cover-up was largely the result of the Church’s culture of clericalism - - and even my most chronic critic, in his comment on the blog, agreed that “clericalism is pernicious insofar as facilitates cover-ups.”

But he then goes on to claim that I ignored the “rainbow-hued elephant in the room” responsible for the crisis itself--namely, “distorted liberalism and rampant and homosexuality in the clergy.” He claims that, to put out the flames of scandal, we must “identify and name the arsonists responsible.” I agree with the general idea, but I believe he has named the wrong “arsonists.” Indeed, I have concluded that, while clericalism is the clear cause of cover-ups, the causes of the abuse itself are much more complex than a single set of villains.  And if we get this wrong any solutions will be false solutions.

Let me survey what I believe are the main factors contributing to the horrific assaults of too many priests and even bishops on children.

First, I must warn that these factors are generally not of recent vintage.  The Pennsylvania cases go back 70 years, and I am personally familiar with cases from the 1940s.  And data on child abuse indicates many abusers were themselves abused as children, which pushes the crisis back into the early 20^th century or further.  For all we know, given the secrecy attending clerical cover-ups, priestly sex abuse of children goes back centuries. Any simpleminded targeting of the “distorted liberalism” of the last 50 years is much too recent to explain priests committing abuse before, say, Pearl Harbor.

And scapegoating homosexuality is a similar dead end.  As Benedict XVI pronounced in 2008, the abuse of children and homosexuality “are different things,” not to be confused.  Homosexuals are attracted to same sex partners, while pedophiles are not attracted to adults of either sex.  The Pennsylvania cases included both male and female victims.  What they have in common was not their gender but their age: they were minors, children. 

So to really understand why this happened we must begin with the basic fact: for generations, some priests have been attracted to sexually assaulting children.  Clericalism allowed them to get away with it, but that does not explain what caused it.

So we face the question: “How could such horror occur in the first place?”

For me, the answer is a complex “perfect storm” of interlocking factors.

I begin with original sin.  We’re all morally frail, unable to do the good consistently.  And since the 5th century Catholic tradition has included the Augustinian notion of “concupiscence”--the idea that we are particularly vulnerable to our sexual impulses.  Thus everyone struggles with desire, and social structures and mores have often been designed to help people control these desires.  Sometimes these were rigid or even cruel, such as the stigma on premarital pregnancy that aimed to limit premarital sex but ended by traumatizing millions of young women with shame, scandal, secrecy, and even imprisonment.

Of course, in any population, people’s desires vary.  If our desires conform to cultural norms, controlling behavior becomes relatively easy: millions of young Catholic men and women, for example, dealt with their desires by getting married.

But in any population, some have more difficulty, since their desires did not fit them norm.  This includes both those with same-sex attraction and those attracted to children of either or both sexes.  These are not the same category of people, but both groups face the same challenge: what to do with my desire?

For some, of course, marriage was a tempting solution simply because it conformed.  But this often backfired: in the case of pedophiles, law enforcement officials report that a high percentage of child abuse is incestuous.  In these cases, pedophiles did not avoid children; they simply produced their own victims.

But for Catholic males, the Church offered both groups another, near-perfect refuge: the celibate priesthood. Priestly celibacy offered a socially acceptable form of sexual nonconformity.  One’s out-of-the-norm attractions did not really matter if one practiced celibacy.

Today the Catholic Church teaches it is not wrong to be homosexual, but that homosexuals must live celibate lives.  Ask yourself: where in our culture is that possible? To this day I recall the priest who confided that he rejected a theatrical career in New York for fear of his own desires.  For him, priesthood and celibacy was much the safer option.  And for many gay young Catholics, seminary brought an end to all the family peer pressure to “find a good Catholic girl” and settle down.

Over 40 years I have observed the result: the percentage of gay men among priests is higher than in the general population.  Nearly all of these men have been good priests leading celibate lives--just as the Church teaches they should.  Indeed, given that teaching, I am forced to ask: where else in the Church do they belong, if not in the celibate priesthood?

But gay priests are not “the arsonists” here.

Abuse expert Jason Berry has studied the crisis for more than 30 years, and he identifies the problem in another group: “psycho-sexually immature” men who find the seminary and the priesthood a “safe” refuge from ordinary norms, only to enter parishes and schools that give them not only contact with children but almost absolute power over them.

We may indeed ask if seminaries were incubators of abuse, since many seminary classes had unusually high numbers of such disordered man.  In Boston it appears that nearly 10% percent of priests committed child abuse 1950-2000—that is more than TWICE the percentage of pedophiles in the male population in general (believed to be less than 5%).  In other words, it’s possible that a sexually repressed culture, combined with the refuge of celibacy, funneled high concentrations of these distorted individuals into seminaries. 

Until we have good data on the history of such seminaries, we do not know the impact of concentrating so many disordered men under one roof for long years of study, often isolated from outside normal family life. No doubt the rule of celibacy provided a protective cover, while traditional teachings on sex as a sacred/taboo subject drove any dysfunctions deeper under cover.

What we do know, from the data available, is that the population of priests entering parish work at least from the 1940s was a disproportionately disordered population, and that a well-established culture of clericalism placed these men in positions of respect, authority, and power with no effective oversight.  Laypeople were taught to obey priests at all costs, were taught that priests were better than the rest of us, and indeed were taught-- another consequence of our sex-as-taboo tradition--that priests were nonsexual beings, above the struggle of desire and self control.  I still recall how shocked I was, perhaps at 12, to learn that priests actually went to confession!

Now we know that the widespread presumption of priestly “purity” combined with real power to create a recipe for disaster.  In hindsight, we see a highly concentrated population of disordered men who could commit atrocities with impunity.

The case history shows that fear kept most children silent, that the myth of pure priestly asexuality ensured that no one believed those who spoke up, and that clericalism ensured the cover-up of the few cases where children were believed.

We must add another factor: the Catholic moralization of all things sexual.  This ensured that, when abusers were exposed, their superiors (usually bishops) assumed the problem was simply sinful behavior.  This meant the solution was equally simple: confession and penance.  And after completing penance (sometimes including rehab), priests were routinely reinstated on the assumption that they had repented their sins.  The result was the notorious pattern of the secret recycling of abusers that enabled them to rape more children.

One may argue that those superiors were simply ignorant of the pathology that rendered penance an empty remedy. But there were enough cases of abusers who repeatedly abused for years, in multiple parishes, that one must ask: did such superiors possess no common sense at all?  Did it not eventually occur to them that penance was not working---that a disordered psyche was not the same as moral failure?  Did they never realize that they were enabling the rape of children?

It is possible, of course, that there’s some overlapping in the categories of priests I have described.  It is possible, for example, that some gay priests abused children, just as some heterosexual priests may have abused children.  But there is no evidence that gay priests represent a statistical threat to the well being of children.  Do some gay priests violate their celibacy?  Probably they do, just as there is a long history of heterosexual priests who had mistresses.  But when we try to analyze the cause of disordered behavior, it makes sense to begin with disordered people.  And screening out gay men from the priesthood, as some alarmists demand, would do nothing to address the problem if such screening still allows the “psycho-sexually immature” to enter seminary life.

If my description of the factors contributing to the sex abuse crisis is at all accurate, then we must acknowledge the painful truth: our entire system of Catholic life--our attitudes toward sexuality in general, our treatment of people who violate sexual rules, our pressures on people who do not fit the norms, our seminary cultures, our demand that all priests must be celibate, our myth about the asexual “purity” of ordained men, our acceptance of the clericalism, our moralization of all things sexual and our blindness about pathological disorders--all these things combined in what I am calling a perfect storm.

Thus the idea that simply screening gay men out of the priesthood will solve the problem is wrong-headed: typically gay men are not disordered by attraction to children; they can make perfectly good priests as long as they obey the same rules as heterosexual priests must obey.

It is time we accept that in any population there will be other men--men who are not capable of either normal married life or the life of the celibate priest.  And we must begin to think about how such men will live in our communities without endangering our children. The priesthood cannot be their refuge. So then what?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2018

#471: Ending Clericalism, Our “Original Sin”

  [Pope Francis’ letter on the Sex Abuse crisis

 has received praise and criticism. 

But one idea deserves deep reflection by all of us.]

The recent outbreak of the sex abuse crisis (Pennsylvania, Australia, Cardinal McCarrick, etc.) prove that any notion that this nightmare was over was just wishful thinking.

Pope Francis’ letter expressed remorse for the church’s failures and empathy for the victims. He clearly is appalled by both the depravity of individual clergy and the equally scandalous (if not worse) cover-up by bishops.

But critics argue we need real change, not just talk. Surface reforms won’t do. We must identify and uproot the underlying causes. This crisis is about failed leadership and governance. We know “This is no way to run the Church,” and we need a different way.

So we must first understand why it runs the way it does.

I think Pope Francis offers the best answer: “To say "no" to abuse is to say an emphatic "no" to all forms of clericalism.” I could not agree more—but to end clericalism we must understand what it is, where it came from, and why it is so dangerous.

Hierarchy vs. Clericalism. People may think the problem is the church’s top-down structure. I would argue, instead, that the problem is not the structure but the culture than drives it.

The Catholic Church’s hierarchy is hardly unique. Over centuries, the church’s hierarchy provided the model for most major organizations in Western culture. Even democratic institutions, like the US government, are heavily hierarchical. The President may be elected, but the entire executive branch is a complex ranking of appointed superiors and subordinates. Hierarchy permeates contemporary society--it has become the dominant way to organize any large institution. The Church is simply the world’s largest and oldest hierarchy--it is, in a word, the mother of all hierarchies.

Lord Acton, referring to Pius IX’s papacy, warned “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But not all hierarchies are corrupt, because they place checks on power.

The American military is hierarchical, but its Commander-in-Chief is a civilian. The executive branch is a hierarchy, but it is checked by the legislative and the judiciary. Corporate hierarchies may be checked by forces either within the organization (unions, directors, shareholders) or outside it (e.g., regulatory agencies, legislation).

The common denominator in all these: while hierarchies place people in positions of authority, those people remain accountable to someone else for the way they use their authority. Accountability is what keeps those in authority honest, by ensuring that, if authority is abused, there will be consequences for the abuser.

What sets Catholic governance apart is not its hierarchical structure, but the absence of accountability.

We should ask:  Why is there no accountability?

Because, while the basic structure of Catholic hierarchy has remained relatively intact for centuries, an evolving Inner Culture was permanently altering the roles of both clergy and lay people. This inner culture, Clericalism, is the “original sin” that has made our present crisis inevitable. The Culture of Clericalism has prevented the accountability we needed to keep hierarchy honest.

In its broadest sense, Clericalism evolved in two dimensions: (1) The clergy became a privileged class, and (2) Lay people became totally dependent. In a word, clergy became the Church’s parents, and laity its children.

 A Privileged Clergy. Over centuries, the top-down hierarchical structure was accompanied by privileges not available to laity. Pastors began functioning as proprietors entitled to income and even to property, as though the parish belonged to them. Priests eventually acquired titles, uniforms, incomes, land, exemptions from ordinary public duties (from jury duty to paying traffic fines), rights and even “special graces” denied to lay people.

The cumulative effect was a caste system: the priesthood became an entitled, elite club, which tended to operate by its own (often secret) rules, invisible to outside view and immune to outside accountability. The Church’s inner culture developed a chronic double standard--one for clergy, and the other for laity.

Modern reforms leading up to Vatican II (1962-1965) stripped away many privileges, but the double standard itself remained. The long history of clergy being above accountability to anyone “below” them continued—and so did the history of the clericalism’s gravest abuse: the abuse of power.

Authority without accountability becomes dangerous. Once I am in a position of authority, I may be tempted to make it my shield. Instead of using authority to serve the Church, I abuse it, controlling whoever challenges my will, demanding obedience and loyalty. People simply follow my orders. So my human weaknesses are hidden. My arrogance goes unchallenged, my dishonesty goes unchecked, my misdeeds go undiscovered. I remain a flawed human being, but authority covers up my flaws like a bullet-proof vest, so I begin to seem invulnerable, morally superior to ordinary humans, hardly human at all. The notion that I stand in Jesus’ place cements my super-human status.

It takes rare moral strength to resist such temptation consistently. Among US Catholic immigrants, the priesthood represented the only privileged state available to most Catholics. The priesthood became such a powerful vehicle of personal advancement—the “Cadillac among professions,” once diocesan vocations director called it—that many priests retired wealthy, with legacies and seashore estates. And all priests faced the diabolical temptation to wield their authority to acquire virtual moral immunity. Too many men succumbed to that temptation. Pretending to be angels, they fell.

And a dependent laity. The deep cultural roots of clericalism have a lay side as well. At the same time that priestly privileges were mounting (from the 4th century on), the Roman Empire was crumbling. Schools closed, civil government yielded to Church control. Eventually the laity were nearly all illiterate and powerless, and it naturally became common to regard lay people as helpless children. (James Carroll has termed this the “infantalization” of Catholicism).

Monasteries, cathedral schools, and even universities in this period were open only to those seeking ordination. The parish priest was thus the only literate member of most parishes. Holy Orders took the place of Baptism as the prime sacrament of vocation, and the priest became the central figure in church life. He was shepherd to his flock, “father” to his family, making the parent-child relationship the controlling metaphor for all clergy-lay relations. The Church’s parents could do as they liked, and the children—the laity—were kept “innocent” by being kept ignorant.

Modern life, of course, eventually rendered this metaphor obsolete. By late 20^th century, American Catholics were as educated, independent, capable and sophisticated as clergy. Yet this obsolete parent-child relationship persisted—and it persisted despite official Church teachings against it, teachings that called for its end.

Vatican II proclaimed the need for a holy, mature, adult laity. In 1985, the US bishops spoke of the laity’s “Call to Adulthood” in the church. Yet many priests still defined clergy-lay relations by the same old cynical rhyme: “We hatch, match, and dispatch; they pray, pay, and obey.” Meanwhile most laity accepted a passive role; those asserting themselves often met resistance, anger, rejection. At best, relations progressed from “parent-child” to “parent-adolescent”—rebellious hostility vs. threatened defensiveness.

Why, despite such calls for a new relationship, has the parent-child model persisted?

My answer: many clergy have clung to the obsolete model precisely to protect their privileged state. An empowered laity raises the threat of accountability—and many clergy, horrified to think of answering to their own people, cling to their role as the Church’s parents, wielding their authority like a personal shield. So, in the present crisis, Church officials opposed laws requiring clergy to report abuse, rationalizing their elitist arrogance with a perverse logic that erupted naturally from the inner culture of clericalism like lava oozing from split rock:

“We clergy (the parents) know clergy sex abuse exists. But the laity (the children) could never handle discovering this, it would destroy their child-like faith, and that would be a scandal. It is our duty to protect them from this truth, so we must take any measure to hide it from them.”

In short, the Church’s culture of clericalism has perverted its hierarchical structure, keeping clergy immune from accountability—and that immunity has now led to disaster on two levels: the sexual abuse by priests, and gross abuse of power by bishops.

What can be done about it? The short answer is: we must institutionalize accountability. And since the hierarchy itself is not about to disappear, the question becomes: how to institutionalize accountability within hierarchy?

Replacing Clericalism.  One thing is clear: operating without accountability is no longer an option. Henceforth the secular society—media, courts, legislatures—will police the Church if the Church cannot police itself. But any solution within the Church will require broad support. Clergy and laity must act to replace clericalism with a new way of running the Church. 1000 Catholics have already petitioned all US bishops to resign as a collective symbol of their willingness to act.

Structural change will be needed: We need effective ways of ensuring that everyone in authority answers to someone else. One priest has already proposed a “Council for Clergy Accountability” with lay, religious, and clergy members.

But structural changes will not be enough. For years police, DAs, and courts possessed the structures to hold the Church accountable, but failed to employ them out of deference—that is, because of clericalism.

Bad leaders can pervert the best structures, but good leaders can improve even bad structures. That means getting leaders whose character, training, support systems, and operating culture make them effective at empowering others instead of controlling them.

This means a variety of cultural reforms: in seminary formation, in the professionalism of clergy and lay leaders, in the Church’s work environment. It also means serious formation that empowers lay people to take on their new responsibility to keep clergy accountable.

Calling out priests for acting privileged was once unthinkable. NOW it is essential, and that means lay people must step up to the plate and do the calling out.

This happens in very mundane ways. Example: a parish council is supposed to be an advisory body. But too often pastors ask council members for individual opinions, rather than asking the council body for its advice. That requires decision-making: do we advise this or that? And if the council decides by consensus, with the pastor present, that can check his authority by giving everyone a veto. This is how accountability can work on the local level.

I’ve worked with pastors whose councils use consensus, and with dozens of other local initiatives that already show us better ways of running the church together: A pastor who invites his staff to evaluate his performance; clergy who consult parishioners to develop priorities for the future; youth ministers, religious education directors and worship coordinators who consult volunteers to keep them involved and invested—all are part of the solution. They model authentic authority, accountable leadership, and transparent operations.

Such “best practices” have already transformed Church leadership in some places, and they need to be more widely appreciated and nurtured. 

These initiatives remind us that Vatican II offered an alternative to Clericalism in the form of Conciliarism—the ancient (but underused!) church culture that brings people together for consultation “as much as possible” at all levels whenever decisions are needed or action is to be taken.

Vatican II was itself an example of conciliarism in action. Many effective parish staffs and parish councils I consult with model conciliarism. But too many priests and bishops still give lip service to conciliarism, resisting efforts to expand it while clutching all control behind the scenes.

But lip service for conciliarism is no longer acceptable. If Vatican II is the work of the Spirit, then its intentions are the Will of God—and God’s Will must be done.

Acting to end clericalism is doing God’s work.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2018

#411: Cover-Up

Ever Since Watergate, Americans have believed that “The cover up is worse than the crime.” Has the U.S. Catholic hierarchy STILL not figured that out?

Two events this week remind us that not only is the Church’s sex abuse crisis still with us; it is also still cause for worry.  For there is fresh evidence that, even now, some members of the hierarchy just don’t get it.  In particular, this week’s events--one in Chicago and one in Geneva--show a hierarchy still torn, among its own members, between apology and denial. 

The denial came to the fore when Bishop Francis Kane, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago, held a news conference concerning Wednesday’s court-ordered release of documents relating to cases against 30 priests accused of child abuse.

Bishop Kane began by apologizing for the abuse itself, and admitted that the archdiocese had been wrong not to act more forcefully, but then denied any cover-up by Chicago bishops:

It was just they didn't realize that it was such a terrible thing, and so I think they did relocate people, but it was not intended as a way of covering up things.

But Marc Pearlman, a lawyer representing 200 of the victims, took exception to the Bishops claim:

The issue is not when the abuse happened; the issue is what they did once it was reported….I think that the files will show a systemic plan over decades in this diocese, along with many other dioceses, to conceal sexual abuse, to conceal who the predators were, and to put the interests of the predators and the institution above the interests of innocent young children…Until there is public disclosure and transparency ... there is no way people can learn about it and make sure it does not happen again,"

Bishop Kane also said, “It's humiliating as a priest to know there were other priests who did something like that."

In both of his remarks, Bishop Kane speaks for many bishops (past and perhaps even present) who find it “humiliating” to acknowledge that priests abused children but impossible to acknowledge that bishops and others covered it up.  Of course, it was precisely this “humiliation” that induced bishops to keep such matters quiet—they were too embarrassed to admit the truth.

What they still don’t get is that, for the vast majority of Catholics who were not touched by the abuse itself, the cover-up is a much greater scandal, and denying it continues to damage the Church’s credibility.

So the question arises: how could Bishop Kane say there was no cover-up?  Perhaps it is a matter of definition. Perhaps he and others think that, if previous bishops underestimate the problem, the result was they did nothing about it—and that was not, at least intentionally, a cover-up. To me, such a view is disingenuous at best.

To clarify, it may help to use a concrete example, so let me tell a story.  A true story.

This happened more than 60 years ago in a small town in the Archdiocese of Boston.  One fine day the pastor of the local parish took a group of altar boys on a field trip.  At some point during the day he sexually accosted one of the boys.  The boy broke away, and had the presence of mind to hitchhike home, where he told his father what had happened.

On his return with the rest of the group, the pastor found the boy’s father waiting for him at the rectory--with a shotgun.  No violence resulted, but the diocese was contacted.  That night, a limo arrived at the rectory carrying the archbishop’s minions, who removed the pastor to the limo, thence to Logan Airport, and finally onto a night flight to exile in Ireland, where he arrived the very next morning.

A team of three priests was assigned to the parish, with instructions to calm the family involved and “avoid any scandal” over the event--that is, keep things quiet (one of those priests told me this story years later).  So the parish never knew what had happened or why their pastor had disappeared literally overnight.

Three years later, he returned from Ireland and became pastor of a parish in another part of the diocese.  No one there ever learned the story either.

Now this story, while dramatic, is not at all unusual.  In fact, it reflects a pattern that was remarkably consistent from diocese to diocese in the U.S. throughout the 20^th century.  In case after case where abuse was charged, the Church’s managers--the bishops--dealt with accusations by taking the following steps:

1. They removed the priest, usually on short notice, with either no public explanation or a phony one.

2. They bargained or bribed to prevent victims and their families from exposing the priest, often in the name of “avoiding scandal.” In many cases, families were promised the priest would never deal with parishes or children began.

3. The priest was sometimes sent away for “penance” and/or for “treatment,” often to a facility operated for that purpose.

4. The priests who remained or who replaced the abuser did not inform the parish about anything that had transpired.  In some cases, they themselves were not informed.

5. The accused priest was generally recycled to another parish or even diocese, either immediately or on his return from exile.  The new parish was told nothing of his record.  If he was assigned under a pastor, even the pastor himself was often not informed of the man’s history.

6. Of course, in a large percentage of cases the recycled priest repeated his offense, abusing more children in his new setting.

One is tempted to say: if this is not “cover-up,” what is?

Let’s grant that bishops honestly failed to recognize that a crime have been committed, so civil authorities were not notified.  Let’s even grant that bishops failed to understand the deep damage done to the children and their families.  The fact remains that no attempts were made to protect future victims, for that would have required notifying others--other parents, other families, other priests, as well as pastors (and sometimes other bishops) under which the recycled abuser was assigned.  Instead of taking steps to prevent further abuse, bishops acted to end each incident quietly and then keep the problem itself quiet.

In a 2010 novel that Robert B. Parker wrote as part of his celebrated “Spenser” series, private eye Spenser interviews a university police officer about the way the university handled the case of a professor named Prince, who had been seducing his students.  Spenser says, “So the university decided to do nothing about Prince.”--and the campus police chief replies: “No, they decided to keep it quiet…That’s doing something.”

Indeed, keeping abuse quiet is doing something--something called covering up.

Bishop Kane seems unable to acknowledge that, whether they “intended” a cover-up or not, bishops managed to cover up the problem so effectively, in diocese after diocese, that the history of abuse was kept quiet for decades (and probably generations) before it finally exploded into public view.  Over the years, dozens of bishops knew the facts and kept them secret.

One of the released Chicago documents, for example, includes former archbishop John Cody telling a priest not to worry about one girl’s 1970 accusation of prior abuse: “The whole matter has been forgotten,’’ he told the priest. “No good can come of trying to prove or disprove the allegations.’’

Sorry, Bishop Kane.  “Cover-up” is the right label for such behavior.

Meanwhile, Vatican officials were appearing before the U.N. Commission on the Rights of the Child in Geneva, where they had been summoned to explain their compliance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (which the Holy See signed in 1990).

While attempting to persuade the U.N. panel of their resolve to fix things, the Vatican’s envoy nonetheless refused to accept a “buck stops here” responsibility.  Instead, he passed the buck for responsibility back onto the local bishops, insisting:

Priests are not functionaries of the Vatican…Priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country.

Yet a U.N. Committee investigator pointed to cases where priests were transferred from one diocese to another, with Vatican approval.  And Vatican guidelines only require notifying local authorities if local laws require it.  Many bishops in the United States led efforts to prevent such reporting laws, including a 10-year legislative campaign to prevent clergy from being designated as “mandated reporters” under the Massachusetts law--a campaign which failed only after the Boston scandal broke in 2002.

The Vatican denials of responsibility ring hollow for one simple reason: while not responsible for the management or discipline of individual priests, the Vatican is responsible for the performance of local bishops.  And since the practice of recycling accused abuses was so widespread, we might ask: by failing to remove or even discipline bishops who covered up, did not the Vatican become complicit in enabling abusers?

In short, both local bishops and Vatican officials fell prey to the same failure: because they did not act to be part of the solution, they made themselves part of the problem.

As the U.N. Committee chairperson said:

The view of committee is that the best way to prevent abuses is to reveal old ones--openness instead of sweeping offences under the carpet…It seems to date your procedures are not very transparent.

Transparency, accountability--these are the hallmarks of a solution.  The failure to employ them is the failure of those who remained part of the problem, not by abusing children but by covering up the abuse by others--and in doing so, enabling abusers to abuse again.

It is high time to stop denying that cover-up happened and enabled abusers.  It is time to begin the long process of rehabilitating the crippled credibility of the U.S. hierarchy.

The last thing we need now is a cover-up of the cover-up.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014